The last decade witnessed a surge of new research in pragmatics and several new theoretical frameworks emerged: different variants of game theoretic and optimality theoretic approaches, non-Gricean approaches to implicatures, and multi-dimensional approaches to meaning. At the same time, research in other frameworks such as Neo-Gricean pragmatics, speech act-theory, theories of vagueness and presupposition theory has progressed rapidly as well. In many areas, an influx of researchers with training in formal semantics has brought formal precision to pragmatic theories. This has led to new empirical predictions, but also sometimes shifted or blurred the semantics-pragmatics boundary. After a decade of diversification, it is time to bring the different approaches together and compare their results and methodologies.

It is the aim of this conference to provide a forum for research on theoretical pragmatics. Pragmatics is understood in a wide sense, including not only classical topics like Gricean pragmatics, speech act and presupposition theory, but also e.g. theoretical models of socio-linguistics, language evolution, and language change. In order to foster the interaction between experimental and theoretical approaches, we explicitly encourage presentations of theoretical models which have a basis in experimental studies, or allow for experimentally testable predictions.

Invited speakers:

Richard Breheny, University College London

Michael Franke, University of Tübingen

Lotte Hogeweg, Radboud University Nijmegen

Prashant Parikh, Univeristy of Pennsylvania

Mandy Simons, Carnegie Mellon University

Benjamin Spector, École Normale Supérieure, Paris

Jason Stanley, Rutgers University - New Brunswick

Organisation:

Anton Benz (ZAS, Berlin)

Katja Jasinskaja (ZAS, Berlin)

Uli Sauerland (ZAS, Berlin)

Reviewing Board:

Nicholas Allott

Anton Benz

Reinhard Blutner

Richard Breheny

Michael Franke

Thorstein Fretheim

Bart Geurts

Alison Hall

Jerry Hobbs

Lotte Hogeweg

Katja Jasinskaja

Jacques Jayez

Manfred Krifka

Emar Maier

Clemens Mayr

Roland Mühlenbernd

Prashant Parikh

Uli Sauerland

Mandy Simons

Brian Skyrms

Stephanie Solt

Benjamin Spector

Jason Stanley

Mark Textor

The conference is organized and sponsored by the ZAS programme area 6 Interfaces between sentence semantics and discourse strategies, the DfG project Implicatures and Discourse Structure (IDis), and the Emmy-Noether research group Interpretation of Quantifiers.